Agenda for Mar 19, 2026

[nairnandu]

Here is the proposed agenda for the Interop team meeting on Mar 19th, 2026:

• Interop 2026 planning process retrospective
• Review test change proposals
• Review open PRs
• Renaming of 2026 focus areas
  • Update shape() CSS function description #1266
  • Retitle some Focus Areas to stop confusion #1267

[nairnandu]

Attendees: @meyerweb, @jakearchibald, @nairnandu, @captainbrosset, @jgraham, @dandclark, @foolip @YulunWu, @stubbornella, @sarony

Brief notes from the retrospective:

Interop 2025 Execution Successes

• The primary success was achieving the project's core goals, resulting in high interop scores (starting with an Interop score of 33% at launch and hitting 97% overall).
• The project delivered a significant number of new features that developers could immediately use.
• The execution process was notably more collaborative and less contentious than in previous years.

Interop 2025 Execution Challenges and Investigations

• A major challenge was dealing with late specification changes or discovering implementation discrepancies late in the process, which caused instability for features like Anchor Positioning and Navigation API. These had to be carried over to ensure completeness.
• Future projects should prioritize features with stable specifications to avoid late implementation issues.
• The team must only take on investigation areas they are fully committed to, as these areas yielded the least impressive numerical results.

Proposal Submission and Refinement

• A large volume of proposals (170+) was received, viewed as a vote of confidence, but many were quickly removed for lacking tests or specifications, consuming time in the process.
• The proposal refinement stage was recognized as ad-hoc and needs to be more structured.
• Automation is required to check for essential elements, such as missing test links, to prune non-actionable proposals earlier.

Champions Selection and Evidence Gathering

• The selection of feature champions was efficient and prevented redundant work across different teams.
• An internal tool built for ranking proposals proved incredibly helpful because it forced prioritization and decision-making.
• The project provides necessary external pressure and internal focus, meaningfully changing browser roadmaps and resource allocation.
• A point of debate exists on making the ranking tool public. This debate weighs the benefits of increased transparency and accountability against the logistical challenges and the difficulty of explaining the complex reasoning used to omit certain highly-ranked items..

Focus Area Presentations, P3 Interpretation, and Timeline

• The team needs to find a way to limit the number of proposals championed or prune the list earlier, as championing too many items makes presentations difficult.
• The definition of "P3" (lowest priority) is inconsistent, but the team agrees it should remain a low-priority option that can still be executed if bandwidth allows.
• While late vetoes are necessary for managing engineering capacity and ensuring equitable work distribution across browsers, the team should strive to speed up the process to better align with internal planning cycles.

Meeting Conclusion and Next Steps

• The conversation about how to conduct planning earlier will continue at the next meeting.